


Princes of the Underworld

by reconditarmonia



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet Collection, Gen, Nonnies Made Me Do It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-01-24 08:21:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18567526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/pseuds/reconditarmonia
Summary: Short ficlets written to prompts: Billie and Daud singularly or together, & and occasionally /.





	1. bodyswap: Billie & Daud

The first thing she notices is her throat. "Outsider's teeth, old man, no wonder you're so pissed off all the time. Don't smoke too much while you're me."

Across from her, Daud is busy binding up the gash in his hand — in _her_ hand. It's odd to see his stance and movements on her body, a little heavier and used to taking up more space; she's careful as she binds up the other gash with larger hands and fingers.

This had better work. Billie's never spoken to the Outsider, but in Daud's body she could almost swear she hears him laughing.


	2. interrogation: Billie & Daud

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"I'll make sure you get to enjoy this."_ —A Captain of Industry
> 
> Warning for implied but not described torture.

The whale oil-powered chair in the meat locker is neat in a way that Daud likes. No effort, no mess. He does not, despite Billie's insinuations, do this for the enjoyment; he'd rather watch her for that.

He wonders if it's a gibe, actually, about the last time. Normally after the tricky two-man part of the job was done and the gang engineer tied up to a chair, he'd have been happy to let her get the information on her own, and present her report later in a uniform not spattered in blood and other fluids. That time he stayed, and took the other chair while she went to work with her hands. After a time, she turned to him, a hand on the straps of her mask. "May I?"

He nodded. The engineer wouldn't make it out of here to remember her face.

Billie dropped the rubber mask on the desk and pushed back her hood, shaking out her hair. Her face was covered in a sheen of sweat. "Thanks," she said, wiping her brow, her gloved fingers leaving blood on the handkerchief.

The room had already been stuffy from the noon sun when they arrived, and now it smelled of all kinds of things. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the chair, as Billie switched to her knife and day slid into sunset.


	3. knife day: Billie & Daud

Daud trains his new recruit personally, showing her how to be stealthier, then how to transverse. He has her steal a token from where he's left it, chase him across roofs, hide in the Watch-patrolled districts and then in other gangs' territories. Billie takes to it all with a fierce joy, secure in the knowledge of a new purpose and in her own remarkable abilities. Then one evening he has her meet him in what they call their training yard, where Fisher is waiting. He puts a knife in her hand — Fisher has his normal blade — and steps out from between them.

No words; Fisher goes for her. She dodges, then, seeming to remember, transverses further back out of his range. He takes a running start and materializes in front of her, but she's already gone, appearing behind his back and slashing with the knife, not enough to make an impression in the thick coat but enough for Fisher to back out of her range again. Between his longer arms and his sword, he's able to keep her at bay as Daud watches them circle each other. She makes a few abortive moves, but can't get within his reach; both of them try a few times to transverse behind again, to no avail.

Daud sees Billie calculating: her tactics, the possibility that she'll die in this test, the reasons to risk it. And then sees her hands start to move up before she appears very precisely inside Fisher's guard, grasping his collar and holding the blade to his throat. She looks over his shoulder at Daud, who nods once, before she lets him go.


	4. the older partner being a virgin: Billie/Daud

When they fought at each other's side in the streets or opposite each other in the training yard, Billie wondered occasionally what it'd be like to sleep with Daud. They'd come out of a fight sweating and breathing hard, her hand on his arm unthinkingly or his gripping her wrist, and sometimes her eyes met his like that and they'd break the contact but not the gaze. Or when they sat up at night going over maps and patrol route notes by the light of one lamp — once or twice she stole his cigarette for a drag, with little more than a token protest from Daud, and she thought: what if she put out the cigarette in the ashtray instead of giving it back, and kissed him?

She tells him about this many years later, when they're sitting together on the bed in her cabin. "Just like old times," she says, neither really needing to acknowledge that they're both much the worse for wear. "We'd stay up like this and I'd wonder what you were thinking. And what you were like in bed."

Daud nearly chokes, and hacks out a cough before managing to get out, "It's a good question." She looks at him, not sure she's understood right, then incredulously as she does understand.

They've both admitted a lot, in those two sentences. And they've had to live with the regrets once already. "Want to find out?"


	5. chess: Billie & Daud

"Why don't you have one of these? Isn't that something criminal masterminds are supposed to do?"

Daud's standing over their mark, and Billie's perched on the windowsill, where the afternoon light illuminates a small table with a chessboard on it. The pieces, mid-game, are barely disturbed; it was little enough of a struggle that only a bone ship and a wood overseer lie overturned. The mark, a barrister with various competing gang connections that finally caught up to him, probably fancied himself an intellectual, playing against himself in his spare time.

"Waste of time," says Daud, wiping his sword on the mark's coat.

Billie's still fascinated with the intricate little figures, pushing a bone pawn at random a few squares forward with a gloved hand. Daud grunts disapprovingly; takes it from her fingers, hops it over a few other pieces to the center of the board, then sets it on top of a castle, then uses it to knock over the wooden emperor.

"Mm. Guess it doesn't apply," Billie says.


	6. masks: Daud

In the early days of the Whalers, Daud wears the mask too. It's an intimidation thing — the masks are useless for blending in outside of the processing plants, and there are no targets worth the coin there, they're not petty hitmen taking out a wife's lover. But the empty expressionlessness of the mask, he finds, has its effect, and there's something viscerally satisfying about tranversing into an opulent bedroom or a fancy garden in a whaler's mask and a hood still stained with oil or chemicals: the unseen and unnoticed becoming the unavoidably noticed and still unseen.

He likes the idea, but it stops being enough: call it a vice, but he wants to put his name on the stories they tell about the Whalers. Pretty soon, his face, as the last thing his targets see, is more intimidating than the mask was.


	7. genderswaps-to-female: Billie/Daud

This is strange and new for her; it's not like Deirdre was an innocent, but she was always someone Billie thought she could protect. (And see how that turned out.) All the girls have been, in some way or another — an on-again, off-again thing with a girl at the Cat who kept a knife under her mattress but never dared to use it, a married lady who liked a bit of rough under her soft, white hands, a flower seller or a seamstress just on the right edge of the underworld that was Billie's.

So Billie finds herself surprised by the feeling that twists in her gut when she pushes for Daud's secrets, the breathless moment before she knows if Daud will give up the information or not; the warmth she feels when she calls Daud _witch_ and gets a grunt in return instead of punishment watch.


	8. pining: Daud(/Billie)

When he's fighting the witches, it's easy for Daud to imagine that this is frustration: frustration with how Thomas doesn't seem to be able to materialize in just the right place at his side, with how the others seem slow or in need of more direction, with the risk to all of them if any of them is less than perfect.

After the threat has passed, though, the itch stays. He'd thought his near-physical awareness of Billie Lurk, present or absent, was an arcane thing, having to do with how strongly the powers he'd given her had taken root. The absence now is just as palpable, and he realizes it's nothing less ordinary than the end of years of living and fighting together, her moving and breathing mirroring his the way he trained her. If he'd known deep down that that would come to an end, he hadn't thought this was how -- but maybe his fight with her, the first time neither of them held back, told her everything he could have wanted to say.

He's getting sentimental in his old age, she'd probably tell him, and there's no room for that in his line of work.


	9. textiles: Daud(/Billie)

First and foremost, what this means is that she's reached a level of skill that makes up for having a big target on her back. He knows that he's excoriated the army himself in her hearing for doing that to its men, and tolerated her raised eyebrow with a sharp response about how he's the exception. What it means is that she's reached _his_ level of skill.

It's his organization and he can run it however he wants, so in that sense there's nothing wrong with his deciding that he'd like to dress his right-hand woman in red so he can always pick her out of a crowd. Still, it feels like it would be too much, too reminiscent of the court and everything he hates about it, to hold any kind of promotion ceremony -- to have her stand before him in her waistcoat and breeches so he can put the blood-red coat on her (to be her armor and let the others look to her as a leader and show everyone she's his), drape one belt over her shoulder and strap the other around her waist (to arm her with the tools she could kill him with). Doesn't mean he doesn't want to.


End file.
